How Shropshire aristocrat kept Eric Clapton company during his darkest days

He was a rock god. She was a teenage member of Shropshire aristocracy.

The relationship of Eric Clapton and Alice Ormsby-Gore, the daughter of Lord Harlech, made headlines. There was speculation that they were to marry.

Alice was with Clapton through his darkest days, when for three years he sunk into a pit of heroin addiction, cut off from the world. He survived and today is a music legend. Alice was a casualty. She died of a heroin overdose while living under an assumed name in a Bournemouth flat in 1995.

Theirs was not a romance ever likely to have a fairytale ending, as was revealed in the BBC documentary “Eric Clapton: Life in 12 Bars.”

“I had begun on and off to see this girl Alice. She was a great woman but she didn’t know that I was obsessed with Pattie,” Clapton told the programme.

Pattie was Pattie Boyd, the wife of George Harrison, the ex-Beatle guitarist and Clapton’s great mate.